Humidor help..

[AndrewNR]

I know I know.. lots of topics already.. I hate myself for doing this already.
I invite you, no I implore you to dumb down your advice and treat me like an idiot here because I feel like one.

I have a Vintec 36 count wine fridge, I'm running it at 12 degrees. I have 2 Humidity pucks in it and 1 pound heartfelt beads.
All beads are 65% yet humidity fluctuates between 70 and 80%.. Sometimes while its at 77% roughly somehow the beads in the pucks will be bone dry and the heartfelts are what I'd describe as regular..

What on earth do I do? Some of my beads are bone dry.. the heartfelt seem.. moist.. normal moist.. And my humidity is up the creek... Do I throw in and purchase another pound of dry heartfelt? Try a different bead? Just burn my entire fridge and cigars, claim insurance and refrain from hobbies im not intelligent or sophisticated enough to pursue..

[Fuzz]

Firstly, is your hygrometer accurate? Best do a salt test to check.

[Heawns]

Is it only 65% RH beads, or are some of those pucks something else? Try and only use beads. Otherwise I guess you ought to use less water.

A crude measurement of humidity is to gently roll the foot of the cigars between your fingers and listen. If you hear a decent crackling sound it is closer to 65 than 75.

[AndrewNR]

Hygrometer is accurate, And the pucks are oz bead pucks. So all beads, All 65%.

Why does god hate my humidity?

And yeah, at 75%+ the cigars do take on a moist feeling.. And my Monte 2's have been mouldy 3 times.. Which I think is actually slowly improving them..

[...]

Not sure it helps but I have had beads that were likely not what the rated rh said.

I had bought 65% ones and my humidity was stable at 70%. Removed the beads, bought again and now the same wineador, at same temperature with same cigars is dead stable at 64%. Put the old beads in a bag and wrote '70%' on the bag for later use... It happens.

I have submitted the case to the retailer and never got an answer. This happens as well.

I'd suggest to start over with a different retailer, buy 60% and 65% beads (if you need 1 pound, buy a pound of each) and put the pound of 65% without moistening them in your wineador while removing all other sources of moisture. If you need a pound, no point in having additional pucks or boveda. Don't overdo it.

Salt test your hygros for a full day (put the test bag inside the wineador at same temp). If settings are off, reset and leave for a full day. Repeat as needed.

Put the hygros in the wineador and leave for a couple of days without opening the door. Read the hygrometers.

If moisture hasn't budged, remove the 65% beads and put the dry 60% in. Leave for a few days and read the hygros.

Now, if moisture has gone down on the 65% beads after a bit but is still higher than 65%, wait a few days more and see if the moisture eventually stabilizes.

[Optic101]

As I understand your temperature is at 12 degree.

What is the temp and RH at your room. How often do you open the fridge for how long ?

Just guessing here, but your fridge is quite cold and everytime you open it warm air with a certain RH is going in and you have condensation inside your fridge.

A higher temp like 18 degree may help.

For some fridge system it can help if the drain is either plugged or unplugged depending on inside and outside conditions and enviroment.

[earthson]

How is your macro environment i.e.: the room in which your wine fridge sits? How is its temp & RH? Higher temps stimulate a higher RH in my region - hot & sticky Tennessee.

[Geaux]

Sorry to hear about the troubles.

Is this your unit?

http://www.vintec-cellar.com/allure_ALV30SG2E.php

I am not seeing a 36 bottle VinTec.... Am I missing something? Also, interested in your environment outside of the humi... Are you hot and humid where you live? What are the current rh and temps?

[OkieJoe]

dry or change your beads out

[canadianbeaver]

Had a similar problem in the last few weeks. I use cat litter crystals. I think even if the crystal look and feel dry, they are not. You also may have too much humidity help for the square footage of your fridge. I have one more than twice that size and do not use that much.

Looked up what to do about it and here is what I did.

Remove any moisture making stuff like pucks and beads. Keep your fridge door open, turning off light and alarm, if possible, for about an hour. Keep hydrometer in fridge. I have little battery powered digital disk ones. One at the top, one at the bottom.

Close the door and check the next day. Your humidity should be down a few degrees at least. Repeat if necessary.

Do not replace beads until you are at 65/65, and only half of what you had before.

Piggy????

[LordAnubis]

How do your cigars smoke?

[rtrimbath]

I had a similar problem that stopped when I added more heartfelt beads. I have an 18 bottle wine cooler and use 2.5 pounds of beads. For a 36 count wine cooler I would think you need more than a pound of beads, but that's just a guess.

[PigFish]

Bingo, Boingo and Bongo… Remember the Banana Splits?

Oh, sorry, wrong forum. The Commies have sapped all my powers and poor misunderstood Fidel, I am feeling a tad guilty about hating him! -LOL

Since insulting communists has gone out of style I guess that I will have to get back to other forum duties. The Banana Splits thing, I am just throwing the commies off scent. I don't really want anyone to figure out my secret powers or utilize them for un-American activities, so you commies don't get the secret decoder ring, or humidors that work…

That is a new rule, no working humidors for commies! You must swear that you are not a commie or I will hex your humidor…! -LOL

I hope you all know that I am just having a bit of fun… I am often misunderstood! -LOL

A working humidor, ladies and gents is self defined. While my abilities to insult people have been severely taxed the past few days, I still am willing to muster some up so here goes.

In Piggy's world, passive humidified, actively cooled humidors don't work. If they work in your world then there is not really much for me to discuss. Lack of data, does not mean that the data does not exist. Poor data, does not mean the data does not exist. For the OP, it is better to find out that you have a problem now, before you grow mold on your cigars.

Lets talk about your beads for a moment. Did the come from a communist country???…. They are at fault!

.

..

…

Okay, okay, I could not resist that one!

Hygroscopic materials are not fixed when it comes to percentage moisture content. I don't know anything about your beads, isothermal data, so I won't pretend to. But, generally, when you drop the temperature in your humidor, the "free," non-communist water, will look to settle somewhere due to the fact that you have taken energy out of it. For those of you still reading, this means condensation, or saturation in your desiccant products (beads).

I highly suggest to people that they stop refrigerating cigars. This is just my opinion.

There was a poster above that I think cut to the root of the matter. It appears that my constant flogging of "ambient conditions" is sinking into a few because I am beginning to read it by more and more members here. I think he is on the right track.

What is likely happening is that the air exchanges are overwhelming your humidor. You don't just get the water from one exchange when you open the door… No, no, no…. You get all the water that will condense on the cold surfaces any time water touches those surfaces, and those temperatures are near, or below the current dew point. This is an unintended consequence of cooling cigars. You should be careful about it.

Did I mention that water is condensing on your cigars as well, you just cannot see it!

Now that we answered that question, the member above did that actually, someone else said take all the water producing elements out of your humidor. That is also a good idea! Why? Because unless you seal them and test them for equilibrium water content, you don't really know if they are part of the problem, or solution. I don't know either, but I am guessing that they are saturated at this temperature and they are not only not helping, they are likely a problem.

Now on to fixes.

All actively cooled solid surface humidors, with active humidifiers, and most without should have a dehydrate cycle. Okay, I get it, yours does not. Maybe we can fix it anyway. Well, it won't exactly be fixed, but I can help you out, maybe!

Your cooler is going to run in cycles. The heat of the room is going to be offset by the cooler running. Lets use that!

What you need to do, even if it is half-assed (I don't know what kind of cooler you got) is try to channel the condensation into a sealed container, or better yet, out of your cooler altogether. You have to attempt to harness the power that is in front of you, the ability to cool the water vapor and get it to condense, and use it in your favor.

What you cannot do (leads to this failure of your system) is allow that water to stay in your humidor.

Here is an idea. Buy a pile of cat litter… Bake it out and attempt to dry some of the residual water out of it. I have some instructions about that posted around in a thread somewhere.

Put it into a box and funnel the condensate into the box. Of course you could drain it out and that would be just fine. But if you cannot do that, trapping it into a dry(er) desiccant will help to lock it up for a short period. Change it out daily for a couple of days and your problem should go away…

Without active control mind you this is just a temporary 'maintenance' fix. You have a design problem and this is just an idea and not really a means to get you a working humidor.

I hope it helps. If you have more details I can generally help you better, but that is all the time I have for this evening!

Please take the Piggy allegiance pledge before posting another humidor question…. -LOL

Note: I am backed up with email at the office and been working away from home and will be for the rest of the week at least. If you need help, you know I am just kidding about the political stuff… and need off line analysis; my email is in my profile. I am really backed up though… so you might want to try this first.

Good luck on your projects. -Piggy

[DrinkSmokeGolf]

Curious why you run it at 12C?

Seems much colder than necessary...

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[DrinkSmokeGolf]

Double post

[PigFish]

Curious why you run it at 12C?

Seems much colder than necessary...

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

While I am only guessing, some of these wine coolers have limited control capability and have fixed cooling algorithms (temps) for wines.

The controllers in these systems, if you don't mind if I generalize, are garbage! The thermal mass of a bottle of fluid is far greater than that of a cigar. Large amplitude swings, as compared to cigar storage optimums, are acceptable in the wine world, whereas they are not acceptable (to me anyway) with cigars.

Cheers! -Piggy

[Dimmers]

Here's a few humble suggestions that have worked for me (Piggy block your ears):

• can you raise the temp to 16C ?
• have you plugged the hole in the fridge ?
• I run with 2.5 pounds of beads in my fridge (same size as yours). You may not have enough beads ( how big are the pucks?) ?

Drying beads - put them in the fridge for an hour, then straight into a ziplock bag with hygrometer until they come back to room temp. if the RH isnt where you want it/ it should be, then rinse/repeat.

[Phippa16]

Mine sits at 68-70 now but I also had issues early with it inconsistent across shelves and hitting 76-78. I found the more boxes I had in there the better it became. Empty to begin with, now full but ha ha

[PigFish]

I was going to save this for a separate 'lesson' thread and attach it to a thread started by Sgt…somebody but never got around to it.

I have to make this brief…

This is an old cooler of mine. I did not like the way it worked, but it passed in the office where it was sitting. I used in mainly to develop my controller, so I hacked the crap out of it, ran tons of wires and sensors to it and started to develop my controller and programming.

It turns out, that some of the previous design ideas that I had were also flawed. Well, I knew that, but with the crappy controller (I won't mention whose, so don't ask) that I was using, while it was most of the problem, it was not all of the problem.

So I thought I would bring this up to Gen9, a design designation that means nothing to you, and I machined a rather 2.5 sophisticated back, just to see if I could pull the idea off, and so I could sell the cooler (once I could show how nicely it worked).

So that is the story…

This is a part of the back assembly.

Aspects of humidor wine conversion design can be somewhat complex. While this cooler is not really worth much to me, the learning derived from the research is priceless to me. When I start taking 3D design CAD/CAM work, examining the idea, measuring, fitting and some re-work, considering my shop rate, I have 2 to 3K of my time in this cooler…!

So anyway, I plug it in. Now, I have to tell you that few new designs just spring to life with no problems, and this one has a few. Of course I use a simulation controller, one with a bunch of manual switches so that I can force launch and turn off controls easily with the flip of a switch… Anyway here is the first run.

Look, I don't have time this morning to analyze the whole chart for you bit by bit, but here is the gist of it.

The tall spikes in rH in the center area of the chart are two fold. One, the dehydration cycle is turned off. That is what happens mates, just so you can see it…

Residual water in the cooler (free water) must be channeled and controlled.

Now this cooler still has a cooler lock out problem and as of this chart, an air control problem, but that is the nature of the beast.

Each cooler is a little different. There are but a handful of tools that one can practically use to fix those problems. The dry cycles exist any time the cooler is running. If you are pulling water into the system with an air exchange you have flood problem awaiting!

Left undisturbed, and outside of a cooling mode, say at a temperature of about 73 or 74 in my case, you must have a dehydration cycle or you are dead! The cooler does not work.

I hope his helps you visualize the problem and emphasizes some of the solution!

Controller, design, appliances, testing… There is no other way!

Oh, by the way. Many of our peers would accept this cooler as working… They just would not see the flaws and therefore 'believe' that they don't exist.

Cheers mates!

-Piggy

[CUBANO]

Great posts Ray, and Let's keep up the fight against communists.

LOL

[Pedro2486]

I was going to save this for a separate 'lesson' thread and attach it to a thread started by Sgt…somebody but never got around to it.

I have to make this brief…

This is an old cooler of mine. I did not like the way it worked, but it passed in the office where it was sitting. I used in mainly to develop my controller, so I hacked the crap out of it, ran tons of wires and sensors to it and started to develop my controller and programming.

It turns out, that some of the previous design ideas that I had were also flawed. Well, I knew that, but with the crappy controller (I won't mention whose, so don't ask) that I was using, while it was most of the problem, it was not all of the problem.

So I thought I would bring this up to Gen9, a design designation that means nothing to you, and I machined a rather 2.5 sophisticated back, just to see if I could pull the idea off, and so I could sell the cooler (once I could show how nicely it worked).

So that is the story…

This is a part of the back assembly.

Ewave42_sub-back_assy.png

Aspects of humidor wine conversion design can be somewhat complex. While this cooler is not really worth much to me, the learning derived from the research is priceless to me. When I start taking 3D design CAD/CAM work, examining the idea, measuring, fitting and some re-work, considering my shop rate, I have 2 to 3K of my time in this cooler…!

So anyway, I plug it in. Now, I have to tell you that few new designs just spring to life with no problems, and this one has a few. Of course I use a simulation controller, one with a bunch of manual switches so that I can force launch and turn off controls easily with the flip of a switch… Anyway here is the first run.

Ewave1.png

Look, I don't have time this morning to analyze the whole chart for you bit by bit, but here is the gist of it.

The tall spikes in rH in the center area of the chart are two fold. One, the dehydration cycle is turned off. That is what happens mates, just so you can see it…

Residual water in the cooler (free water) must be channeled and controlled.

Now this cooler still has a cooler lock out problem and as of this chart, an air control problem, but that is the nature of the beast.

Each cooler is a little different. There are but a handful of tools that one can practically use to fix those problems. The dry cycles exist any time the cooler is running. If you are pulling water into the system with an air exchange you have flood problem awaiting!

Left undisturbed, and outside of a cooling mode, say at a temperature of about 73 or 74 in my case, you must have a dehydration cycle or you are dead! The cooler does not work.

I hope his helps you visualize the problem and emphasizes some of the solution!

Controller, design, appliances, testing… There is no other way!

Oh, by the way. Many of our peers would accept this cooler as working… They just would not see the flaws and therefore 'believe' that they don't exist.

Cheers mates!

-Piggy

Nice.

Piggy, you need to start a Twitter mate

[PigFish]

Nice.

Piggy, you need to start a Twitter mate

I am on twitter mate. All political stuff and an occasional pic of a cigar. I prefer to post cigar stuff in meaningful places, FoH and another forum (private).

Twitter, while if you are a biased news junkie like I am, has a purpose but not much of one. The guys that run it may be bloody rich, but the concept is pretty much useless to a guy like me! I think it is kind of a stupid format…. What do I know about trendy web stuff? Not much!

Cheers! -Piggy

[AndrewNR]

Hmm, I think Piggy that what I should take away from that constructively is leave my humidor open awhile.. dry my beads seperately.. introduce some dry odourless cat litter and raise the temperature checking for results... possibly adding more beads Willco!

[AndrewNR]

Much appreciated by the way

[PigFish]

Much appreciated by the way

Open, only if the ambient rH is lower outside. Raise temp, surely (MHO). Refrigerating your cigars is causing you havoc. I define refrigerating as attempting to drive the temp of cigars below that of about 70dF, say 19C.

I use temp control for stability reasons, not to make cigars intentionally cool or cold. I don't think cool or cold is necessary or desirable. There is of course an argument to be made about cooler temps and pest control. That is why I store at around 70dF. If it were not for the pest problem, I would likely store closer to 75, but that is just one man's opinion!

Best of luck on your project.

Cheers! -Piggy